A take on Clinton's campaign
For his election staff, narrator Henry Burton and others, deflecting the flak from showing on opinion polls is something they can't be very good at if they don't know what more is going to fall out from Stanton's closet. The hard-boiled professionals orchestrating Stanton's shot at high office and glory don't quite like flying blind.
They can't also prevent the elections from being all about trash and smut instead of the future and the grandchildren and their parents and all the other 'You Are My Sunshine' poetry that politicians have to come out with to connect with the locofocos whose votes they are after.
Instead, in comes Libby, a 250-pound lesbian whose special chemistry with the Stantons makes her uniquely qualified to dig out the dirt in Stanton's past and pave it over—the morals of which makes her pump lead in her brain towards the end. Stanton, however, perseveres in an all but lost race and tries to make his only skill of connecting with ordinary folks pay in the end.
While this best-selling and eminently well written novel is obviously based on Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, the author's identity is still, in Clinton's words, "the only secret I have seen kept in Washington in three years".
Even though a computer analysis lists Newsweek columnist Joe Klein as the most likely author, it's not conclusive. But what's conclusive is Stanton's and therefore Clinton's own image as a politician who never paid the bill. Well, it's election year and voodoo of the McLeod brand might yet come to haunt him.